While efforts to ease pain are essential to providing care for those who suffer, our attempt to eliminate pain has been, at times, overzealous. We are particularly overreaching in our elimination of pain when we determine that the only way to treat incurable pain is to end someone’s life, as is common for patients with terminal diagnoses or those with disabilities. Rosemarie Garland Thomson describes this overzealous attitude as eugenic logic. Eugenic logic is the common belief that the world is better without pain, suffering, and disability. It has been present throughout history in various policy efforts and cultural practices that segregate and eliminate disabled lives. Eugenic logic responds to the problem of pain with one solution: eliminate it – and if pain cannot be eliminated, then the best option is to eliminate the life which experiences pain.

Throughout the Christian tradition, pain has not been a problem to be eliminated. Efforts to resist the temptation to uniformly eliminate pain are repeatedly present in Christian narratives. Pain is not a problem to be solved, but an experience that can lead to profound meaning and a deeper connection with the Divine. Story-tellers in the Christian tradition continually describe pain and suffering not with fear, but with appreciation. One such narrator is Jane Austen, who uses pain and suffering in her novels to demonstrate virtuous character development.

In this paper, I argue that Christians should reclaim Jane Austen’s understanding of suffering as central to the development of virtue in the Christian life. Austen addresses the 19th century version of eugenic logic – invalidism - in Mansfield Park. Invalidism was a trope that applied mainly to women which determined that feeble bodies reflected feeble minds and enforced exclusion from rational participation in social life. Austen resists the temptation of the invalid trope by creating a heroine, Fanny Price, who is physically feeble and weak, but morally strong and courageous. Fanny Price is Austen’s most virtuous and disabled heroine. ​Using textual analysis of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, I will demonstrate how Fanny is able resist the social exclusion created by the trope of the invalid through her contemplative reflection on suffering. Unlike her antagonists, Mrs. Norris and Mary Crawford, Fanny does not shy away from the opportunity to reflect on the suffering and pain she has experienced. Reflection leads her, and no other character, to developing constancy – Austen's most important virtue. Fanny’s ability to cultivate constancy is what leads to her true virtuous character and a life of genuine happiness in relationship with others and God. Christians can resist eugenic logic and the temptation to overzealously eliminate pain by reclaiming Austen’s belief that suffering is valuable for its ability to lead to virtue and happiness. Instead, as Jane Austen demonstrates in Mansfield Park, the presence of pain and suffering in a community of Christians leads to a closer relationship to God. Therefore, Christians should welcome those who experience pain into the center of social communities and consider how we can restructure our gatherings to make them accessible to those who experience pain.